Parents' Transparency
by BeaconMarker
Summary: Even Helen gets tired. Bob has to take over watching Violet, but he doesn't watch quite closely enough.


It was early on a beautiful Saturday morning when it happened.

Helen broke.

"Bob!" Helen's voice rang through the air, quickly followed by another bout of screaming from a certain very unhappy black haired baby.

Bob had been trying to block out the noise and get back to sleep by burying his head under a mountain of pillows, but after hearing his wife's exasperated cry, he reasoned he'd better get up and at least attempt to help. He slowly sat up, kicking one leg at a time off the side of the bed and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He squinted at the tiny alarm clock display, eventually making out a tiny green 5:24 AM through the blur of sleep.

"Bob! Please!" Helen cried out again, this time a little louder, and a little more frantic.

"I'm coming, I'm coming..." he responded through a yawn, getting up and stretching widely. He walked stiffly from the master bedroom to the nursery in the next room over, and made a mental note to buy slippers. These wood floors were cold.

His wife was... a sight. Her shirt was in disarray, the bags under her eyes would have worked splendidly when they couldn't find suitcases for their honeymoon, and she was still wearing yesterday's clothes. Had she never come to bed? He couldn't remember. He had slept like a rock after a long, frustrating day at the office. Her long, blazing red hair stuck out in every direction, matted in places and—was some of it on the floor?

"Hey, honey! Are you o-"

"Please! She... I just- I can't- I don't I'm so... sleep. Can- j-just help, please-" she mumbled, staring into Bob's soul with her big brown eyes.

"Oh, my-" he started, and raced across the room to the rocking chair where the frazzled mother sat, rocking a now somewhat calm baby. "I'll take Violet. You go get some sleep." He lifted the baby with shocking gentleness from her arms and helped her out of the chair. Back down the hall he went, this time leading the droopy eyed redhead to the warm comfort of their bed.

At the foot of the bed, Helen paused and turned back to the baby with a guilty look on her face, and reached out with both arms to try to take her back.

Bob quickly freed an arm—which wasn't hard, considering that Violet was small enough to fit in just one of his massive hands—and gently finished leading Helen to lay on the bed.

"Get some sleep." He said softly and planted a kiss on her forehead. "I love you."

"I love you, too." She sighed, and flipped slowly over to lay flat on her face on the gargantuan pile of pillows Bob had set up just minutes before.

On his way out the door, Bob heard a gentle snore and smiled as he turned around to look again at his wife. Her small frame was dwarfed by the size of the bed—it had to be big, to accommodate his size—and she looked like a single peaceful ship drifting along an ocean of lavender bedsheets.

He gently pulled the door shut behind him and paused just outside the door. He looked down at his daughter in his arms, and she giggled and spit out something small and mint green.

A button.

Bob made a mental note to make sure Helen got that back later.

•••

Bob's face split into a wide grin as his tiny daughter completed her third enthusiastic lap around the living room.

"You're just a wonderful little crawler, aren't you Vi? Aren't you?" He said happily, lifting her off of her crawling path and tickling her stomach. She giggled and reached out to grab his nose. He laughed back at her and set her back down to crawl to her heart's content. "I'm gonna go clean up the mess you made with Mommy earlier. I'll be right back."

He was scared to open the nursery room door when he got there. It had looked nothing short of frightening when Helen had cried out for his help a couple of hours earlier. Bracing himself, he slowly opened the door and entered the room.

It wasn't that bad.

He supposed it was the jarring sight of his haggard wife that had made it seem so terrible before.

With impressive speed and unlikely grace for a man of his size, Bob put all of the haphazardly thrown toys back on their shelves, opened books back in their order, and two more small green buttons in his pocket. He let out a low whistle as he realized that his prior observation was right, and bent down to sweep the long red locks that had been forcibly separated from Helen's head into his hand.

On the way out of the room he tossed the hair and other miscellaneous bits of trash into the bin by the door. Now, back to little Violet.

Smiling broadly, he entered the living room and scanned the floor for the avid crawler so he could pick her up and keep her entertained for the remainder of the time her tired mother slept heavily. However, his daughter wasn't anywhere to be seen.

Staying calm, Bob walked slowly around the room, checking if she had hidden around the corner of the couch or under one of the side tables. No luck.

 _Now_ he panicked.

Cushions flew everywhere. The couch was overturned. Cabinets were flung open and slammed shut, bookshelves cleared, and lamps toppled over. Violet had just vanished into thin air. How could this have happened?

Other than...

At that very moment, Robert Parr was overcome with emotions. Conflicting emotions, granted, but emotions nonetheless.

He was proud. His kid had to have powers! There was no other explanation.

He was relieved. The baby wasn't dead. He hoped.

He was terrified. He still didn't know where Violet had gone.

"Violet!" he called as loud as he dared, trying not to wake Helen. If she woke up to this disaster, he'd be a dead man. Of course the child didn't reply, so Bob's frantic search continued.

•••

When Helen woke up from her long and much needed nap, she immediately felt something was off. The house was too quiet. The air had gone stagnant.

Immediately turning to the defensive, she slipped out of the bed and moved to the door, bracing herself for whatever lay beyond. Stepping cautiously out into the hall, she raised her fists and peered down the walk to the living room. She saw a lampshade on the floor. Had someone broken in? _Well_ , she thought, _bad move on their part._

She sneaked silently down the hall, back pressed to the wall and feet not making a sound. The sight that met her eyes as she rounded the corner was... not what she expected.

The living room and kitchen were in shambles. Nothing was even remotely where it belonged, and every lamp in the room was broken. Most disturbing of all was what looked like mustard on the floor and walls.

Her eyes landed on her husband. He was sitting in the middle of the couch, staring at a diaper in his hands. He looked afraid, and next to him lay the crushed remnants of a mustard bottle.

"Uh, Bob? Did a tornado blow through our living room?"

No response. She rand a hand through her knotted hair and looked around the room. Then she realized.

"Bob... where is Violet?" She asked calmly, hoping, praying that he knew the answer.

"She's right here." He said slowly, lifting his hands slightly.

Her brow furrowed. Was he joking? "Honey, that's a diaper." she said, halfway between sarcasm and sincerity.

He chuckled softly, as if he were too tired to laugh any louder. "Oh, I promise, it's not just a diaper," he answered, his tired voice breaking.

As if she knew her mother needed to see proof, Violet reappeared in her father's oversized hands. Seeing the shock on her mother's face, the black haired, blue eyed, definitely visible baby let out a loud giggle.

"Oh lord." Helen gulped. Their baby had powers. She felt like she should be excited, but she felt more scared than anything. The kid could vanish, for Christ's sake! This was going to be a challenge. "How did you... you know—find her?"

As Violet started chewing on his index finger, Bob removed his other hand and lifted the multilated mustard bottle into the air. "She somehow got her diaper off, so she was completely invisible... so I squirted mustard around until it got on her." he said, seeming to perk up a little at his own strange child-locating technique. "But you didn't like that, did you Violet? No you didn't." He said to Violet in his best attempt at a baby voice, bringing her close to his face. She laughed again and smacked a tiny hand to his cheek.

Bob said something unintelligible to the infant, and started to regain some energy at the actual sight of his baby girl. "Anyways, it got a lot easier once I figured out things would show if they were on her. But it wasn't-" he looked up, and saw Helen walking toward the front door, her purse slung over her shoulder. "Are you going somewhere?"

She stopped and turned to him with a smile. "You seem to have this down to a science, but our baby just got a billion times more difficult," she said exasperatedly, and ran a small hand through the hair Violet had so much fun tugging at. "And I have to get a haircut."

She turned on her heel and left her husband behind with the tiny disappearing child. The next few years were bound to be interesting.

* * *

 ** _A/N:_ **_Thanks so much for reading! Feel free to leave a review, I love hearing from you! More to come soon. :)_


End file.
